I have been a silent observer of this board for some time and would like to add some of my observations to end 2005. I sometimes visualise the Muppets when reading the banter and I am amazed the discussions have lasted for so long. I was very busy in the late nineties meeting with Senior Network, PBS and ATSC personalities. This was because the company I worked for at the time, Snell and Wilcox was a world leader in De-interlacing & scaling, MPEG MOLE technology and had made the first high grade De-Interlacer/Scaler Chip in partnership with IBM. This chip is the core of the Snell Interpolator so performance was not an issue and in fact it was better than the great majority of chips made today. The discussions were more about the politics of the lobby groups rather than deep technology. Ultimately it came down to US protectionism, Zenith, who held most of the VSB IP was the last US Consumer player and needed protection from those nasty foreigners. It is quite typical that zenith was sold to the Far East with all the IP as soon as the Standard was rubber stamped. More recently a V large US Telecoms company tried to burden Iraq with an obsolete Mobile phone system along the same lines. Get a few noisy Senators out there and stitch up the market. It's not surprising that the consumer manufacturers are not interested. OTA is a political mess and the original reason for the slow take up was CE manufacturers expecting heavy warranty costs induced by the poor performance of 8VSB. NIH is rife in engineering so it's naive to expect major CE manufacturers to rely on a competitor for vital hardware. As there are a number of other delivery channels in the US why bother with OTA anyway. Then you had the PC software lobby who desperately needed to delay everything for a few years and used old school friends in high places to achieve it. In the UK, technology is not an issue, the price was. After the false start with ITV Digital, freeview has been popular as it mostly just works. Rabbit ears are only used for secondary receivers in the UK, most houses having Loft or External Antenna. I just bought my mother in law a $60 freeview box, I had to try it out. I have lived in my house for 25 years, the antenna was already there when I bought the house and only once had maintenance when I sealed up the junction box as it had filled with water. The box just worked on all channels.At the Mother in laws who has a loft aerial some 15 miles away the story was the same. What about mobile? Well most of the teenagers round here scream around in their little auto's fitted with multiscreen DVD portable players. The auto is the social meeting place. When the 12 volt freeview box that lets them watch Big Brother comes out they will rush out and buy them. Of course this is just SD but the BBC and ITV companies are trialling HD boxes next year (2006). So what should you do? Change to something that works and is supported fully by all the worlds CE Manufacturers. After all you can keep PSIP and all the other stuff, just replace the bit that doesn't work, as Stephen has posted many times COFDM is also a US invention. There is a neat box that plugs into the scart socket http://www.johnlewis.com/Shopping/Product.aspx?Type=SKU&ID=230222642&source= 6132 And I have seen a USB stick freeview receiver, http://www.freecom.com/ecProduct_detail.asp?ID=2234&nr=25451&prodn=DVB-T+USB +Stick The choice of boxes in the supermarkets for mostly less than $100 is excellent. -----Original Message----- From: opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Stephen W. Long Sent: 24 December 2005 19:14 To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [opendtv] 2VSB Status? (was Lawmakers Establish 2009 Deadline for Analog TV Phaseout) Does any one know the status of 2VSB in the chips / specification for ATSC? When my small group dared to say publicly that ATSC had no clothes, in a now classic story, the lawyers on the ATSC side of the table insisted that robust and mobile reception was going to be delivered via 2VSB. All of the 8VSB receivers would have 2VSB modes and everyone would be happy. I have not heard a peep about 2VSB since that time. Is it possible that the 20 lawyers on the other side of the table that day that threatened to sue me personally for delaying the DTV transition were not telling the entire truth? Did they know 8VSB reception was problematic and that only 2VSB could provide robust reception? The most incredible "truth" I ever heard an ATSC proponent say was the remark - "Oh, ATSC works great - in our tests it worked 75% of the time..." In the stunned silence at this remark, an advisor to my boss's boss made the reply comment that "in our business, we are use to communications working at least 98% of the time." My boss slipped me a note under the table, saying, ..."you were right after all." I could only nod. Some of us tried to tell the truth. We lost the battle, and I was threatened by one lawyer with personal financial ruin if I continued to fight - the other side had too much money to buy lawyers instead of engineers. ATSC is here, probably to stay. It still does not work well enough to warrant the investment made by the broadcasters and since there is no mass market rush to buy ATSC receivers, free OTA television is a lost cause in the USA. At the time, several people told me I did not understand what was really going on - ATSC was a perfect solution if you wanted OTA television to fail, which means everyone would switch to cable and satellite, then all of that UHF spectrum could be sold off to cell phone companies. I told such folk they were too cynical. Now, I am not so sure they were wrong - I believe that is exactly the path we are on - OTA will cease to exist, or at least no significant number of people will ever rely on it. And that is a problem for the Nation. When extraordinary weather or even worse events happen, I still believe we need OTA television to get information to the public. When a tornado passed within a mile of my house, I was watching my local TV weatherman and his Dopplar radar to see the path. I wanted to SEE the path, not hear about it on the radio. My family was hiding in the basement, using rabbit ears on an old basement TV. The picture worked! The DirecTV dish quit working - clouds too thick. The cable company here is a joke - service drops out frequently (when it rains), so I threw them out of the house years ago. I recently bought the Accurian ATSC DTV box. I can only reliably receive three digital stations, in a market of ~10 transmitters. Using the SAME coaxial cable, I can get beautiful analog reception on 10 out of 12 stations on my TV/VCR, etc., and the two marginal stations are viewable, just noisy (low band VHF sucks in my neighborhood). On the basis of my superb analog UHF reception, I do not believe it is my antenna that is at fault. Since the UHF DTV transmitters are collocated (most of the time) with the analog UHF transmitters, it is not an antenna pointing problem that is causing the bad DTV reception. So, I will repeat the question I first asked in ~1999 - what is the plan to use 8VSB transmission to provide emergency communications to the American public? In public testimony years ago by the then head of ATSC to Congress, the claim was made that ATSC/8VSB was important to the national defense - ATSC would be a vital tool for public communications. Will 8VSB provide at least the same performance as NTSC in this vital role? No, 8VSB will never work properly as a reliable communications system in adverse echo environments (the real world of cities and suburbs, where most of the people live). So, can we trust the promised use of 2VSB to provide this service? I don't know - I just want to see delivered what was promised. Stephen At 11:40 AM 12/22/2005 -0500, John Golitsis wrote: >Oh good, you're just as confused as I am over John's last comment. > >Smart is to Mercedes Benz (who offers SUVs) as DVB-H is to ATSC. >Related, but catering to completely different markets. > >Even if there was an ATSC mobile "mode", do you really think the >networks would allow you to broadcast their material that way? How >much does Verizon and Apple (for example) pay them to address the >mobile market? How much do you? How much would you? > >On 22-Dec-05, at 11:33 AM, Mark Aitken wrote: > >> What do I and smart cars have in common? Did I miss something? >> <http://www.thesmart.co.uk/> >> >> <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6605730767077503480> >> >> <http://www.smartcarofamerica.com/> >> >> And, oh, by the way, Smart Cars are safer than most SUV's... >> > > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- >You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: > >- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org > >- By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.